Page Slow Loading - only with FlexiContent

FlexiCache has always been turned on.

I can change to a different menu (from mega menu) to CSS and Moo to see if it speeds up the load times.

The Mega Menu uses some images to create the rounded edges. But really, are a few images going to make the page load times 7-10 seconds? It doesn't do it on their demo site for this template: demo.gavick.com/joomla15/may2010/

sorry for mega menu it's for me ....
for you speed up one idea do you use a croop or size option in your first page ?

I'm not sure what you are asking about on the front page... Could you clarify for me please?

on your front page do you use loding a image field with crop or rezize option ?

I believe so, I'll have to check. There are no images in those 2 articles - which is using a Gavick component.

I switched to a different template and I believe it's helped fix the loading time. I testing it with www.LoadImpact.com right now and the load times are around 6-8 seconds... a little long for me but that's workable now at least.

I'll keep looking into this and will report back my findings today and tomorrow.

I'm using mod_news_pro_gk4 for the "Latest District News" module and there is NO image resizing feature turned on.

As you can see, I added a slide show at the top of the page for demo purposes. Not sure I'll use this slide show module/component or a different one.

Load Impact is showing about a 7 second load time during its test that is current running.

It has to be template related because I have the site on 2 different templates to work on the design and the loading time seems to be much better...

http://www.franklincityschools.com.php5 ... tlink.com/

http://www.franklincityschools.com.php5 ... nk.com/v2/


Is it loading better for you guys now too?

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MonroeOhio.org website
There is a huge BMP image being processed by phpThumb.
On first load this takes over 9 seconds.
www.monroeohio.org/images/stories/city%20bldg.bmp

That image is 1600x1200 and is over 5 MEGAbytes.
You can see the HTTP call when the home page is loaded.
www.monroeohio.org/components/com_flexic...180&h=180&aoe=1&q=95

Changing that huge source image to a much smaller one should help.


Some of the other images could be much smaller.
For example, your original banner bridge PNG (112 KB)
[attachment=0:tpfgcmul]<!-- ia0 -->banner_bridge.png<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:tpfgcmul]
Converted to a 90% JPG (33 KB)
[attachment=1:tpfgcmul]<!-- ia1 -->banner_bridge.jpg<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:tpfgcmul]

These are just a couple examples.
The Joomla Performance forum has a lot of tips.
These pages could be made much smaller and much faster.


While watching the HTTP interactions . . .
I am seeing a large variability in the download times on images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.
This points to server load effects.

For example this one CSS file has taken as long as 5+ seconds.
www.franklincityschools.com/CFIDE/script.../ext/css/ext-all.css

Same for a couple other CSS files. 4-6 seconds.
Does not seem to be directly related to the file size.
This points to server load effects.

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kenmcd Thank you VERY much for the pointers. I've gone through and resized some images that they've uploaded that are huge. I've told the client (and all of our clients during training) numerous times about using large images. It never sinks in though.

I've noticed some templates load a lot fast than others, when developing sites with FlexiContent. At first I thought it was something I was doing wrong with configuring FlexiContent so I thought I'd get feedback from you guys to help me.

I really appreciate it!

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One thing you can do is remove bmp,BMP from the acceptable file types in the configuration.
That should at least keep them from uploading those usually huge files within Joomla.
And maybe jog their memory about image sizes.

This type of image resizing takes a lot of the server's memory and processing power.
The performance hit slows all websites on that server.
That could explain some of the server load variability.
See this post in the Joomla forum for more info:
Re: SOBI2 Out of memory when loading/saving images


Something else I noticed on the Monroe website is that scrolling module at the bottom takes a lot of client processor power. Depending on the user's system this could be 20% to 40% of their processor power.
This causes the website to appear slower to them.
The amount of the performance hit depends not only their system capabilities, but also on which browser they are using.
The slower the browser JavaScript performance, the bigger the performance hit.

Easy to test this.
On Windows start Windows Task Manager, select the Performance tab.
Then in your browser,
in one tab open a page with the module, then
in another tab open a page without the module.
Click back and forth between the tabs.
Watch the CPU usage.

I have never found any scrolling module so compelling a user experience that it justified this performance hit.
Instead use a random module to make the same links.
It loads, it's done.

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